What’s Going On With Inflation, The Federal Reserve, and The Stock Market? And What Should I Do Next?

So far in 2022, we have experienced a wild ride in the stock market.  We started the year by going down 20% or so over 6 months, then we recovered half of those gains in the next 6 weeks or so, only for the market to fall back down below it’s previous lows.  As of this post being published, the S&P 500 is down around 21%. So what in the world is going on?  In today’s post, I am going…

View Post

Should You Put 1% Of Your Money Into Crypto? Ric Edelman Says Yes. I’m Not So Sure.

Unless you have been living under a rock for the last few years, you have heard about the most recent craze to make money, cryptocurrency.  Now there are tons of people talking about cryptocurrency, and like everything in life, be careful on whose advice you take.  There are just starting to be a number of prosecutions of insider trading in the crypto space, and my guess is we’re going to see a lot more in the months ahead.  With something…

View Post

3 Reasons Why I Disagree With Warren Buffett’s Investment Advice

One of my favorite people to learn, inside the financial world and even outside of it,  is Warren Buffett.  I have been a big fan of his for a long time, and even went to his annual conference with my Dad in 2017.  And I tend to agree with him most of the time.  But he offers some investment advice on a regular basis that I can’t quite get behind. Now if you don’t know, Warren has a company called…

View Post

The Most Important Thing To Determine Before You Retire

If you’ve been planning to retire in the next few years, odds are that you’ve spent a lot of time reviewing your investments, including the account balance, the specific investments you own, the asset allocation you have, and even reading about proper distribution strategies.   While all of that is important, you’re actually missing the most important thing to know before you retire:  Your Retirement Expenses! Simply put, nothing else matters until you figure out how much you want to…

View Post

15 Things I Wish Every Retiree Knew

As we all know, there is a lot of noise out there coming from TV, newspapers, friends and family members as to what we should do with our finances, and how we should plan for our retirement. A lot of it, frankly, isn’t such great advice. So I’ve been thinking: If I had the ability to speak to everyone close to or in retirement, what would I tell them? Well, this is what I would say. 15 Things I Wish…

View Post

4 Reasons Women Are Better Investors Than Men

Do you want to become a better investor?  If so, I’d encourage you to look at the lessons that female investors can teach us. During the last decade, there has been a plethora of research on the investing differences between men and women.  At the outset, it wasn’t exactly clear what the research would show. But by now, the evidence is clear: women have qualities that make them far better investors than men. A study by the University of California…

View Post

Forthright Finances Investing Philosophy

If you’re going to invest in the stock market (whether on your own or with a Financial Advisor), it’s essential to know what your investing philosophy is.  What is going to guide your decisions on how to invest? The good news is this doesn’t have to be complicated.  You don’t need to get an MBA or degree in finance to understand (or create) an investment philosophy. What you need to do is make sure that you understand, and agree with,…

View Post

7 Questions To Ensure You Are Fully Diversified

We have all heard that we want to make sure our portfolio is diversified, and I’ve definitely said that on this podcast many times before.   But what does that mean exactly? Well, that’s the topic of today’s episode.  We will go through 7 questions that you can ask to make sure your investment portfolio has all the characteristics of a diversified portfolio. 1. Do you have any market cap deficiencies? Large cap refers to companies worth 10 billion or…

View Post

ETF vs Mutual Fund: Which is Better?

Investment decisions are filled with many ongoing, never ending debates: stocks vs bonds; IRA vs Roth IRA; active vs passive,  4% vs 3.3% rule? While it is pretty easy to determine a winner in some of these face-offs, one of the hardest to decipher is exchange-traded fund (ETF) vs mutual fund. Their similarities make them nearly identical to the average investor, while their minute differences might appear as light and day to a seasoned financial planner. Deciding on which one…

View Post

5 Tips For Navigating Down Markets

If you’re going to be invested in the stock market for the next 30 years (which you’ll need to do if you want to create a retirement paycheck that will last for life), then you’re going to experience down markets, like what we’re going through so far in 2022.

Tune in to today’s episode as I go through 5 tips/reminders I have on how to navigate down markets.